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Steve Huffman, Reddit’s co-founder and chief executive, says new rule changes will help the company fulfill its mission.
By Kevin Roose
On Monday, Reddit, a dressage room that for years has been regarded as the dirtiest mud pit on the Internet, banned more than 2,000 communities as a component of a broad crackdown on hate speech.
The greatest notable victim of Reddit’s largest pro-Trump community crackdown, r/The_Donald. The group, which had nearly 800,000 followers, was a virtual gathering position for President Trump enthusiasts and a source of countless memes, slogans and conspiracy theories that made their way into the broader online conversation. (In recent years, it has become a sinkhole of racism, violent threats and selective harassment.)
These moves were a major revival for Reddit, who spent years resisting the assumption of the posts of modecore users and refused to remove all the worst content from its platform. Steve Huffguy, co-founder and ceo of reddit since 2015, when he returned to the block after a six-year absence, faced the site’s legacy of fanaticism. This year, many Reddit moderators signed an open letter to Mr. Huffguy and Reddit’s board of directors requesting replacements to the site’s policies.
On Monday, after the bans were announced, I interviewed Mr Huffguy about the verdict to eliminate The_Donald and other subreddits. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Can you explain, in the most succinct way possible, why you decided to take down these subreddits?
Yes. We have counters and content policy to load a specific rule that prohibits hate on Reddit, which has long been an implicit rule, through design. But not being specific about it, I think, has caused all the bureaucracy of confusion over the years. And then we counter the rule.
And in either case, in any case, we make a rule change, we compare communities opposed to the rule change. And so, as a result, there were communities that we ended up banning.
A few weeks ago, he wrote a letter to his staff about Black Lives Matter and Reddit’s position on disorders such as hatred and racism. To what extent do you think the political climate, protests and the kind of account we see played a role in that decision?
The current parties have added more urgency to it. That said, we’ve been running an update on our content policy for some time, and we had a game station concept and fixes.
A few years ago, you were asked to specifically ban The_Donald, and you said, “There are arguments on both sides, but in the end I think their anger comes from the feeling of not having a voice, so he won” won “I don’t solve anything if I take away their voices. What’s changed?
So The_Donald is complex, and I think it’s unimaginable to reduce the difficulties or giant political organization of giant apples to a thing or point of view. One facet of The_Donald is that this is too big a political network that, at one point, represented the prospects of the great Apple Americans. Political discourse is sacred in this counterattack and has also been given to us implemented in Reddit.
At the same time, these netpaintings had content that broke the rules, content that was harassment, violence or intimidation. Therefore, our strategy has been to bring these netpaintings in line with our content policies. We made moderator changes, varied technical changes to bring The_Donald online, some more a success than others, but finally not to the point we needed.
One thing I’ve said many times is that the only way to keep best friends’ online moderation online is by painting along with netpainting members and moderators, because they have the context to resolve whether individual content is hateful or not, for example. . Which suggests that if we don’t agree with our moderators and our communities that those are the rules everyone respects, then a netpaintings you don’t want to paint with us have no position on Reddit. And I think that’s become very transparent with The_Donald over the years, or perhaplaystation in recent months.
Facebok now faces a boycott of advertisers: corporations are taking flight from their classified ads to control company policies and their inability to emphasize bugs and hate speech on the platform. Reddit also has advertisers, who are likely to have the same concerns. Is it a business decision?
No, even if, of course, what you’re saying is true: we’ve been given advertisers who care about those things. But it was a resolution, a chain of resolutions, a great friend, for Reddit.
Reddit’s task is to bring netpaintings and belong to everyone in the world. And for a long time we were given this debate about Reddit and internally, weighing the trade-offs between speech and security. There are bound speeches, such as harassment and hate, that prevent others from speaking. And if we’ve been given Americans and communities on Reddit who save you other Reddit Americans as we see fit, it means they’re directly opposing our assignment.
In a resolution this week, you said something about how you fought to balance your values as an American with the decency of your values. Can you know more about what you mean by that?
I think this is something a gigantic variety of other Americans is facing right now.
When we announced Reddit five years ago, we didn’t ban things. And it is easy, as is the case with the masses of young people, to make statements like this because, first, he had more rigid political convictions and, second, lacked real global attitude and experience.
Over the years, we have faced increasingly serious decisions and we have to weigh the commitments. And here we are, believing that freedom of speech and freedom of expression are literally best friends, one of the things that makes Reddit special, but at the same time, by seeing that everything goes against our mission.
The solution for us was our mission: what are we looking to accomplish on Reddit? And what is it to get there?
You used to joke that you were Reddit’s “absolutely politically friendly CEO” For a long time, it seemed that neutrality was the ambitious goal of being a form of social media. And now it seems that the leaders of Apple Platshape, adding to you, admit that this is never a very tight goal, or no less than one that provides wise results. Do you think the era of the plats-neutral form is over?
I will reject this a little, because the prohibition of hatred, violence, intimidation and harassment is less political and more of widely shared values in this country. And in fact there is the political debate about how far freedom of expression deserves. But as in the United States, there is no unrestricted freedom of expression, there are limits. And I would like to say that the Supreme Court has also fought this for many years, because those are the most difficult debates of friends.
I’m bothering you a little bit, so don’t ask the most obvious follow-up question, but … although I have political opinions, they don’t appear through Reddit. And no one, all my years at Reddit, my best friend, liter, asked me for my political opinions.
Okay, what are your political views?
You’ll have to give me an explicit case. But I think my point beyond is that running at the service of our task is never a good catch. The prohibition of harassment is never a good trap.
But in today’s political environment, even saying something like “Black Lives Matter” puts you in an aspect of a cultural divide and a political divide. So how do you think even assuming they’re partisan decisions, other Americans will interpret them as such?
You know, I think the solution is in your question. I believe that making statements, or making changes to our policies in the call for huguy decency, was seen as political statements. But for us, he’s doing the right and practical thing.
Over the past two weeks, the president has threatened to revoke legal protections for online companies, and has sued Snapchat and Twitter and other platforms to revel in taking action opposed to him. Are you afraid of becoming the goal of the president and his allies?
Well, I think the latest news from the Justice Department required those bureaucracies to constantly enforce their terms of service. And, therefore, we are doing what he requested by applying our own terms of service.
I am bound to be a satisfactory reaction to every user in the Trump administration.
[Laughter] I’m good, aren’t we?
One thing that has been said about social media for a long time, and that some say about the plathras, is that social media is just a mirror to society. For example, social media disorders are just a reflection of the disorders that exist in society, and so are the wonderful things. Do you think the analogy is valid?
Yes, but let me explain a little.
So, once you look in a mirror, the first thing they do is see each other. And the moment all they do is fix their appearance. They brush their hair a little bit, or whatever. Mirrors don’t look unidirectional, in that sense. This is an opportunity to see how we are our best friends and make a resolution that this is what we want to be.
Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of The Verge, had a nice navigation tweet. Verbal exposure to political, legal and fiscal reasons why bureaucracy might wish to take strong action against reprehensible discourse. He said, “Sometimes the solution is as undeniable as other Americans who look at what they were given and make the decision that they would love to be more proud of what they are.” Is that about you?
That’s what I’ve been doing. And to be honest, I said the words on Reddit. When I came back on the first day of year five, I said to the block, “One of my goals is to make you proud of the paintings here.” Because at the time, the apple wasn’t well placed. People who painted on Reddit liked Reddit (you won’t be on Reddit in 201 five unless you like Reddit) and aren’t willing to use their loot in public.
Like your Reddit sweatshirts and T-shirts?
Precisely. And that made me sad. It is, I think, an overwhelming thing too herbary to want to make the world an easier place. I know those words are moderate in this town, but some people say so.
His attorney general said Monday that there has been a position for President Trump on Reddit. But given the way the president has tested the limits and regulations of all the bureaucracy he’s working on, and created all the headaches for his leaders, do he prefer Mr. Trump on Reddit?
Look, no one wants to be in an echo chamber, right? It’s annoying and unpro obligatory to read a one-sided view of Apple’s big problem. We welcome matters of state from all walks of life. I think the rhetoric and taste of Trump’s crusade are intentionally antagonistic, making it easier to violate our policies. But we were given giant apple conservatives on Reddit, and we were given Trump supporters on Reddit who are perfectly capable of following our rules. And we hope this will remain the case in the future.
His co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, recently left Reddit’s board of directors, saying he was looking to make room for a black board member. And when he made that announcement, he said that the component of the country explained he did was find a solution when his daughter asked him, “What did you do?” I don’t think they have children, but if they’re making decisions like these, how long do they know how long the generations at Reddit won’t forget?
You know, when I think about that time, and … if I can tell my young children about this, I can say I didn’t stop, I was part of that and I did everything I could to stick for myself and our values, even though our uncontinious friend is quite difficult.
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